Fred Perry

Fred Perry was an English tennis player and table-tennis champion who in 1934 became the first British man to win the Wimbledon men's singles championship in 25 years and remained the last British man to do so until Andy Murray in 2013. He was born Frederick John Perry on May 18, 1909, in Stockport, Cheshire, the son of a cotton spinner and Labour Party politician, Samuel Perry, and grew up in working-class Wallasey and later in Ealing, west London.

He won the 1929 World Table Tennis Championships men's singles title at age 18 before turning his attention to lawn tennis. Between 1933 and 1936 he won eight Grand Slam singles titles — Wimbledon in 1934, 1935, and 1936; the U.S. National Championships in 1933, 1934, and 1936; the Australian Championships in 1934; and the French Championships in 1935 — making him the first player in tennis history to win all four major singles titles, the Career Grand Slam.

He led the British Davis Cup team to four consecutive Davis Cup victories from 1933 to 1936 and turned professional at the end of 1936, touring the United States in head-to-head series against Ellsworth Vines and Bill Tilden. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War and took American citizenship in 1938.

In 1952, with the Austrian footballer Tibby Wegner, he co-founded the Fred Perry sportswear brand, whose laurel-wreath polo shirt became a fixture of British mod, skinhead, and Britpop subcultural dress from the 1960s onward. He died of a fall in Melbourne, Australia, on February 2, 1995, at age 85, while attending the Australian Open. A bronze statue of him was unveiled at the All England Club in 1984.

His name Fred is the short form of Frederick, from the Germanic Frithuric, combining frithu meaning "peace" and ric meaning "ruler" or "power" — that is, "peaceful ruler." Frederick was a fashionable English boys' name in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when he was named.